Material World

When Canadian media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message,” he did not mean that the content of all emails is somehow the same, given their common encoding as emails. Rather, he meant to critique the idea that communication is like a parcel service: we pack down messages into their containers, send them off, and they are received by their recipients in just the same state as when we sent them. Just as all language is not the same: a short “hey” can, depending on the situation, mood, interlocutors, volume, and so on be a greeting, a warning, a verbal touch on the shoulder. The medium is not a neutral space through which a message passes, untouched. Rather, the medium plays a constituting role in the creative process, and when we interpret the artwork, we must pay just as much attention to the technologies, processes, and materials that made the work of art as the ideas and forms that shaped them.